The Limits to Commercial Capitalism

In his latest book A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2020), Jairus Banaji provides a masterful overview of historical trading relationships in Europe. At the same time, this book also reveals once more the limits of an understanding of capitalism, focused on market exchange relations. In this blog post, I will provide a critical review drawing out the weaknesses of such an approach.

Capitalist expansion, the war in Ukraine and three decades of missed opportunities in Europe

There had been huge hopes for a peaceful, prosperous future in a united Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Three decades later, the war in Ukraine has brought these hopes to an end. In this post, I will argue that the seeds for the current crisis were sown right at the beginning of the post – Cold War period in the 1990s, when capitalist social relations of production were imposed on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) backed up by NATO military power.